Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  The credits unscroll. I glance at the photograph of my mother above the end table, the girl on the bridge.

  It must have been effortless for him—that nameless man who took it—to come into town, snap that photo, do his work, and leave. It would have been just another stop to him, another job wrapped up, the fate of the old bridge settled, that quarter-mile stretch of state-owned road at the hell end of the world’s end, done—a final report in a manila folder stashed under two suitcases in the trunk of his car, as he drove north up that new single-lane highway for the last time.

  I can see it, his hands knuckling the wheel—maybe a tad hungover, a tad weirded out from the run-in I imagine he might’ve had that night with some local drunk washing himself in gin at the bar. Some local boozer, sitting one seat away, huge hands slinging back drink after drink, starting in with that same story about how he might have killed the son-of-a-bitch he’d caught porking his wife. The locals good and tired of hearing it shifting away and the outsider prey to the tale of how he shot that bastard in the head, dug a hole and rolled him into it, and wasn’t he lucky to be near the gravel pit where the digging was easy.

  I know it does me no good to run it through my mind, but God, couldn’t it have been just this way?

  That man. He would have been like those angels. Removed. Nothing taken from him. Nothing robbed. Listen. Observe. Assemble. As that lush kept motoring on, his wild story so excessively detailed that, for a moment, the engineer almost believed it was true.

  Effortless.

  Who was it? Faulkner? Who said the past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  I make it, miraculously, through the Fourth of July. The family cook-out at a cousin’s house, and the parade—fire engine sirens blaring, decorated floats scudding by—I am sure I will see him, that I’ll look somewhere and see him—wish and at the same time, don’t—candy hurled, hoses spraying, children shriek as they scurry, scooping Tootsie Rolls and Dum-Dums off the street.

  I start making Polly’s birds. Bird after bird. Fold after fold. Body. Beak. Wing lined against wing. I make the edges perfect. They could not be more exact. Creases deep. My nails are down to the quick. I have to use a folding bone.

  Bird after bird. Twenty. Forty. Fifty. I make them late at night, in the morning, in the dull flat heat of the day—all different sizes, colors, shapes—a few out of one-dollar bills—some thumb-size, some with movement, you tug their heads, their wings flap, their little feet fold up—I set them all down on the floor of the room upstairs.

  Sixty. Seventy-two, and I’ve spent through my paper, even the Italian gilded stuff that’s too expensive and not stiff enough to hold—I put a call in to Kate’s Paperie to order more—Express Ship, I tell them—even still, they say, it won’t come before Monday.

  I can’t wait until Monday. I start making my own paper—I glue colored tissue to aluminum foil—they will be exquisite, these Christmas birds—more than she could have wanted, more than she could have imagined.

  * * *

  I take Alex’s kids to the Fair. We go on Thursday because on Thursdays you can buy the bracelets for fifteen dollars that give you unlimited play on the rides.

  I get the kids pizza, which they scarf down.

  Sebastian is thirteen now, way cool—he hooks up with a group of his buddies, peels off.

  “Later, Marne,” he says, doesn’t even acknowledge his sister.

  “Ten PM sharp at the gate.”

  “Yeah.” He shrugs.

  Laney stays with me. She has just turned nine and is on the chunky side, wears glasses, she is shy. She slips the sweaty stub of her hand in mine as we walk around, and I tell her stories of her father, Alex, how he could never ride the rides. Puked once all over some girl he was with. I tell it in full gross detail—the kind of detail children love, and she laughs. She’s got a little girl’s laugh, still, she hasn’t been able to shed it, and I might just cry when she does. We ride the giant slide six times, race our sacks down it, then the spinning dragons, then the flying swings.

  We wander through the animal exhibit, kid goats nibbling our hands, then we go back to watch the Minis. We’ve just settled into decent seats on the bleachers, when I catch sight of Huck Varick, sitting with some cronies and his little grandkid, she’s wearing red boots, on the opposite side of the ring.

  I talk Laney into cutting our tractor-pull-viewing short. She bargains for the Ferris wheel, begs me to go on with her, but this is one ride I won’t do. The combination of slow revolution and extreme height. Can’t do it.

  I wave her off, as the chair she sits in alone churns around. I run into Selma McGuire, who has just set her twins on the same ride. Selma was in school with me and Elise. She gives me a cheek-peck and asks how I’ve been. We chitchat, and Laney screams my name. I look up, my niece is living my nightmare, stuck at the top in an open chair, swinging back and forth while the gondolas down below load. I smile and wave to calm her.

  Selma is telling me now about her new Prius, how she didn’t even know she had emissions guilt until she took it out on the highway for the first time and felt a burden lift. Selma has been freed a number of times. Quit drinking cold-turkey, she’s a happily married born-again now, and tonight she’s arranged to the nines. Her hair in spunky curls, a lighter shade of blond than it ever was in high school, she’s got a white lace shirt on, tight, cork platform sandals, capris, still working it—how she dresses now the only residue of what she once was before meeting God and Mr. Right.

  Laney is still on the ride. The Ferris wheel’s circling now, and she’s happy. I drift away and glance down at my watch, I can’t see the big hand, I turn and take a few steps to get under some decent light. When I glance up, I am walking right into Ray. He’s startled, didn’t see me coming, either, I can tell by the look on his face.

  “Hey,” I say, but he is already past me, a curt nod in my direction, his eyes cool. His daughter, Anna, who is Laney’s age, is with him. She glances back once, but Ray just keeps walking on, not changing his pace. They disappear around the Del’s Lemonade booth.

  I see Ray once more that night. From the Tempest, as the night sky whirls, the black outline of the woods hurtling toward us, then away, my hair whipped across my face, then whipped back as we spin, our chair thrusts around, Laney shrieks, clutching my thigh, and I look across that twinkling sea of noise and screams and smells, and find him, standing in a break in the crowd near the giant slide, his face pale in the dark. He seems to be looking toward us. Each time we come around, I pick him out of the throng, still looking toward us like across that distance it is safe.

  He’s gone by the time we come to a standstill. We teeter off. Less than half an hour later I realize I should never have taken that ride. My whole equilibrium has been thrown—it was trying to fix my sight on him, I think, that threw it—if I could have just given myself up to the whirling, I might have been fine. Might have been. There’s an awful tinny ringing in my inner ear, and my brain feels crinkly, all scrunched to one side, the other side flung open, way too open.

  * * *

  I’m up to a hundred birds.

  A few days later, my brother Alex stops by the house, I am upstairs ironing my shirt for work when I hear the truck pull in, the telltale clomp of his boots on the porch. My mother comes up from the cellar to see him, their voices drift up through the pipes.

  He is telling her about some family camping trip his wife Lisa’s trying to yank him into; then there’s the two-week baseball camp in August that Sebastian’s got planned. Then I hear my name. It’s Alex who kicks it off—the do-you-think-Marne-will-ever-get-her-act-together conversation. “Throws herself at my best friend, now look what she’s managed to do.” I listen to him rant on longer than I should, my mother’s gentle replies—in the end it’s the gentleness that gets me—I yank the plug out of the socket, leave the iron upright to cool, and go down, making enough of a clatter on the stairs that by the time I walk into the kitchen, the silence is like shocked glass. I cut rig
ht through it, throw the fridge open, grab a peach, a knife from the drawer. I walk outside, letting the screen slam behind me—the wood swells in summer and it doesn’t fit flush to the frame. I walk away from the house, dust in my eyes, that burning I don’t want to feel. The peach is damp in my hand, tawny ridges wrapped through its fur. Thoughts like dirt in my brain.

  “A belt slipped, I don’t think there’s any tightening …”

  That was how they put it. Those women down at the Point Market when my father took me there one day for a coffee milk. I must have been around ten. He paid for the milk, then went outside onto the porch to have a smoke and a talk with Ernie Mason. I lingered behind in the cool musty dark of the store, thumbing through a rack of superhero comics by the penny-candy bins. The bell rang, once, twice, someone coming in, someone going out, and there were two women in the aisle, one holding a can of beans, the other buying milk. I didn’t know them—they were talking about another woman, whose name I didn’t catch, and how she missed a step when she lost that baby, that little Samuel, how tragic it was, that fever he got that flew to his brain, took him fast, he slipped out of the world on the quick, and poor Carleton—my ears pricked up then, curious to know who it was now they were talking about who had the same name as my father—I must have moved a step closer, and one of the women noticed me then, her mouth went tight, and the other who was talking on, sensing something amiss, turned and took me in, and it was one of Those Moments, those two women, strangers both, looking at me with such a queer mix of ashamedness and pity that what never would have crossed my mind suddenly struck home. I gripped that bottle of coffee milk so tight I could have twisted the cold neck of it off and I walked outside to find my father.

  I kept the secret (what else would I have done?), never asked, either one of them, did not mention it to Alex, about our brother. But I ransacked the house on the sly, scoured closets, dressers, attic trunks, books she read, pages for some scribble in a margin, a photograph, scraps of paper, some proof bearing his name, and found none, not a trace of him, but realizing still, without having the words to bind the thought, that he was those small clothes in that old bureau drawer I had seen her once folding, unfolding; he was the fleeting stuff, one of those blurred un-things you see on occasion move quick at the corner of your eye, and realizing, too—this more slowly, as I began to piece the years together—that I had been born to replace him. It wasn’t until I was older that I went to look in the obvious place and found his name and dates on the small stone.

  I told Alex, knowing by then he had been old enough to remember.

  He met me with a shrug. “And—?” he said, then, “Hey, did you take my keys?”

  I sit on the bench by the garden and wait for my brother to leave. Inside me, darkness, my mind scrubbed. Sun nicks my feet and the frayed hem of my jeans. With the knife, I peel the skin from the peach. I’ve never liked the skin. The fuzz texture, the mealy rub of it. I watch the fruit in my hand shrinking under the blade, I pare the skin in such a way that it unfurls in one long, continuous piece.

  ——

  Sunday. Monday. Tuesday. My paper arrives. I split the packing tape open. Boxes of it. Sheets and sheets. One hundred and twenty birds, one hundred and thirty. Smaller species now. More homespun, familiar. Sparrows. Starlings. Stubby bodies grown fat by summer’s end on insects and bayberry fruit. Birds I have seen all my life, seen and never seen, on their migrations through. They cluster in flocks on the floor of the room upstairs with the gulls and the Japanese cranes. The room so full, I worry for a moment, it will lift, wing away.

  I drive down to the restaurant to pick up my check. On the way back, I take the highway. I’m driving slower than I should—there’s a silver Altima on my tail—a young girl driving, and she’s tapping at the wheel, impatient behind me, she’s got a little scowl on, she nudges out into the lane, trying to find a blank stretch with no oncoming traffic so she can pass. She presses closer, gives me a honk, which I ignore. I glance at the speedometer.

  There’s a rip in my jeans near the knee. That pair of jeans I wore the first date night of down-under before it all turned wrong-side up. As I drive, my fingers trace the tear, the white softness around the hole, free skin through it, and I think of him, that shiver when he touched me.

  At the red light, the Altima pulls up alongside, on my right. The girl in it doesn’t look at me, just stares right ahead, like she’s pissed at the road. There’s a dent along the door on the driver’s side and I know what she’s plotting—the grim set of her face is so easy to read, a certain familiar wreckage I can glimpse even at profile. The light turns. She guns it. I put the gas to the floor. She’s not a day past eighteen. I shouldn’t test her. It’s a junker she’s driving, I can hear the groan of the muffler as she keeps up with me even as the lane she’s traveling in narrows, tighter and tighter, still she clings, her tires hitting over the serrations that demarcate the edge of proper road, in another five seconds she’ll be off it.

  I touch the brake just enough with my foot to give her the room to squeeze in. She slips onto the single lane ahead of me and speeds off, her window unrolls as she goes, an arm—lovely, alabaster-pale—coming through the open space. She throws me the finger.

  The rest of the day dribbles by. I work on Wednesday. The restaurant is unusually busy. The season’s kicking in. On Thursday, I am up before eight, casting about in the kitchen with an Irish soda bread mix I dug out of the pantry. My father has already come home from checking his pots, and he’s eating the breakfast my mother fixed for him, a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, while she steams the five lobsters he brought in. She stands at the sink when they are done, shelling out the meat, casting the split-open boiled red carapaces into a pile.

  I am in her way. I know this. With my wooden spoon and soda bread in a mixing bowl. The directions on the box are foolproof. Preheat oven to four hundred. Knead gently on a lightly floured surface. She finds ways to step around me when she needs to. They talk here and there, my parents, mostly to each other.

  I’ve just slid the lump of dough into the oven and sat down at the table with my toast when I hear the truck pull in, assume it’s my brother, then glance out the window and see that it is Ray.

  He’s looking for Alex, he says as I walk outside, wiping my hands on a dishcloth. He’s been trying to get hold of him since Monday, left three messages on his cell, went by the house, but there was no truck, no sign of him there, of anyone.

  “They went up to Maine,” I say. “They left on Saturday.”

  He nods. “That explains it.”

  “Some cottage by a lake up there. Lisa insisted. Kind of hauled him off.”

  “When’s he back?”

  “Saturday, I think.”

  He looks through me. “Well, tell him I came by, would you?” He’s got a paper coffee cup in his hand, he starts to turn away.

  “It was pretty last minute,” I pipe up.

  He glances back.

  “Lisa got some good deal—you know how Lisa loves a deal.”

  I sit down on the porch. He is still standing there, paused at the bottom of the steps, his hand on the square cap of the rail, those light freckles along the bridge of his nose, they seem to have more color now. It’s summer, I think. Summer. Don’t go. He’s on the verge of leaving, I can feel it, I can feel him, on the verge.

  I start chatting on, about how there was someone else trying to reach Alex as well, some customer who got a bill in the mail, wanted it itemized, had a few questions, you know how people can’t seem to quite trust you when it comes to paying up—“I don’t think there’s phone service in that little cottage they’re staying in up there—have you got somewhere to be?”

  “Work,” he answers.

  “Where are you working?”

  “Finishing up a job.”

  “Around here?”

  “Fairhaven.”

  “So you have to be there.”

  “I’m on my way there.”

  “Now?”


  A slight pause. “Just about now.”

  Some coffee has spilled out the little triangle drink-hole peeled from the plastic lid of the cup. He sips it off.

  “I hate that,” I say. He glances up and I nod to the cup. “When it leaks out like that.”

  He takes another sip of coffee. Then lowers the cup.

  “How are things going with you, Marne?”

  “Oh,” I smile. “Somehow.”

  He gives a short laugh, and I feel a pop, slight, like someone’s just pulled back a vacuum-packed seal.

  I consider pointing out that here we are again—on my parents’ back porch—like everything of import has to happen here. Or maybe I could mention, in an off-the-cuff sort of a way (is there such a thing?), that tomorrow is Friday again, when my mother will go in search of his—looking for a chance to lay everything down on the table, play that ultimate seven-letter-word to say it all.

  Like you ever could.

  “What was that?” Ray asks, and I realize I was speaking out loud—how much out loud?—I feel a flush spread through my face, and deeper inside, things coming apart.

  “I didn’t mean to—” I start to say, start to explain—then stop. My throat is tight. He is looking at me—that look in his eyes like before—isn’t it? and I can’t really say anything, look anywhere else.

  He’s still holding that coffee cup. He takes the four steps up onto the porch where I am, and sits down.

  PART VI

  SALVAGE

  COIN

  JANE

  July 23, 2004

  “So what’s the damage?” Ada asks me now. “No no. Forget about it—I don’t want to know.” She eats one of her chocolates, grinds the nut in her teeth. “Alright,” she says. “Tell me.”

  “I’m ahead.”

  “I do know that. By how much?”

  “Twenty-four. Not so much.”

  “You’re a bug,” she says and laughs. She is happy now. I have passed her up, but the board is open, flung wide enough that it will stay open. The board is how she wants it to be, and I can feel the happiness coming off her—a humming in the silence between turns.